3-manifold

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

An image from inside a 3-torus, generated by Jeff Weeks' CurvedSpaces software. All of the cubes in the image are the same cube, since light in the manifold wraps around into closed loops, the effect is that the cube is tiling all of space. This space has finite volume and no boundary.

In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a space that locally looks like Euclidean 3-dimensional space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer. This is made more precise in the definition below.

Introduction

Definition

A topological space X is a 3-manifold if it is a second-countable Hausdorff space and if every point in X has a neighbourhood that is homeomorphic to Euclidean 3-space.

Mathematical theory of 3-manifolds

The topological, piecewise-linear, and smooth categories are all equivalent in three dimensions, so little distinction is made in whether we are dealing with say, topological 3-manifolds, or smooth 3-manifolds.

Phenomena in three dimensions can be strikingly different from phenomena in other dimensions, and so there is a prevalence of very specialized techniques that do not generalize to dimensions greater than three. This special role has led to the discovery of close connections to a diversity of other fields, such as knot theory, geometric group theory, hyperbolic geometry, number theory, Teichmüller theory, topological quantum field theory, gauge theory, Floer homology, and partial differential equations. 3-manifold theory is considered a part of low-dimensional topology or geometric topology.
A key idea in the theory is to study a 3-manifold by considering special surfaces embedded in it. One can choose the surface to be nicely placed in the 3-manifold, which leads to the idea of an incompressible surface and the theory of Haken manifolds, or one can choose the complementary pieces to be as nice as possible, leading to structures such as Heegaard splittings, which are useful even in the non-Haken case.

Thurston's contributions to the theory allow one to also consider, in many cases, the additional structure given by a particular Thurston model geometry (of which there are eight). The most prevalent geometry is hyperbolic geometry. Using a geometry in addition to special surfaces is often fruitful.

The fundamental groups of 3-manifolds strongly reflect the geometric and topological information belonging to a 3-manifold. Thus, there is an interplay between group theory and topological methods.

Important examples of 3-manifolds

Euclidean 3-space

Euclidean 3-space is the most important example of a 3-manifold, as all others are defined in relation to it. This is just the standard 3-dimensional vector space over the real numbers.

3-sphere

Stereographic projection of the hypersphere's parallels (red), meridians (blue) and hypermeridians (green). Because this projection is conformal, the curves intersect each other orthogonally (in the yellow points) as in 4D. All curves are circles: the curves that intersect <0> have infinite radius (= straight line).

A 3-sphere is a higher-dimensional analogue of a sphere. It consists of the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point in 4-dimensional Euclidean space. Just as an ordinary sphere (or 2-sphere) is a two-dimensional surface that forms the boundary of a ball in three dimensions, a 3-sphere is an object with three dimensions that forms the boundary of a ball in four dimensions.

Real projective 3-space

Real projective 3-space, or RP³, is the topological space of lines passing through the origin 0 in R⁴. It is a compact, smooth manifold of dimension 3, and is a special case Gr(1, R⁴) of a Grassmannian space.

RP³ is (diffeomorphic to) SO(3), hence admits a group structure; the covering map S³ → RP³ is a map of groups Spin(3) → SO(3), where Spin(3) is a Lie group that is the universal cover of SO(3).

3-torus

The 3-dimensional torus is the product of 3 circles. That is:

${\displaystyle \mathbf {T} ^{3}=S^{1}\times S^{1}\times S^{1}.}$

The 3-torus, T³ can be described as a quotient of R³ under integral shifts in any coordinate. That is, the 3-torus is R³ modulo the action of the integer lattice Z³ (with the action being taken as vector addition). Equivalently, the 3-torus is obtained from the 3-dimensional cube by gluing the opposite faces together.

A 3-torus in this sense is an example of a 3-dimensional compact manifold. It is also an example of a compact abelian Lie group. This follows from the fact that the unit circle is a compact abelian Lie group (when identified with the unit complex numbers with multiplication). Group multiplication on the torus is then defined by coordinate-wise multiplication.

Hyperbolic 3-space

A perspective projection of a dodecahedral tessellation in H³.
Four dodecahedra meet at each edge, and eight meet at each vertex, like the cubes of a cubic tessellation in E³

Hyperbolic space is a homogeneous space that can be characterized by a constant negative curvature. It is the model of hyperbolic geometry. It is distinguished from Euclidean spaces with zero curvature that define the Euclidean geometry, and models of elliptic geometry (like the 3-sphere) that have a constant positive curvature. When embedded to a Euclidean space (of a higher dimension), every point of a hyperbolic space is a saddle point. Another distinctive property is the amount of space covered by the 3-ball in hyperbolic 3-space: it increases exponentially with respect to the radius of the ball, rather than polynomially.

Poincaré dodecahedral space

The Poincaré homology sphere (also known as Poincaré dodecahedral space) is a particular example of a homology sphere. Being a spherical 3-manifold, it is the only homology 3-sphere (besides the 3-sphere itself) with a finite fundamental group. Its fundamental group is known as the binary icosahedral group and has order 120. This shows the Poincaré conjecture cannot be stated in homology terms alone.

In 2003, lack of structure on the largest scales (above 60 degrees) in the cosmic microwave background as observed for one year by the WMAP spacecraft led to the suggestion, by Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Observatoire de Paris and colleagues, that the shape of the universe is a Poincaré sphere. In 2008, astronomers found the best orientation on the sky for the model and confirmed some of the predictions of the model, using three years of observations by the WMAP spacecraft. However, there is no strong support for the correctness of the model, as yet.

Seifert-Weber space

In mathematics, Seifert–Weber space (introduced by Herbert Seifert and Constantin Weber) is a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold. It is also known as Seifert–Weber dodecahedral space and hyperbolic dodecahedral space. It is one of the first discovered examples of closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

It is constructed by gluing each face of a dodecahedron to its opposite in a way that produces a closed 3-manifold. There are three ways to do this gluing consistently. Opposite faces are misaligned by 1/10 of a turn, so to match them they must be rotated by 1/10, 3/10 or 5/10 turn; a rotation of 3/10 gives the Seifert–Weber space. Rotation of 1/10 gives the Poincaré homology sphere, and rotation by 5/10 gives 3-dimensional real projective space.

With the 3/10-turn gluing pattern, the edges of the original dodecahedron are glued to each other in groups of five. Thus, in the Seifert–Weber space, each edge is surrounded by five pentagonal faces, and the dihedral angle between these pentagons is 72°. This does not match the 117° dihedral angle of a regular dodecahedron in Euclidean space, but in hyperbolic space there exist regular dodecahedra with any dihedral angle between 60° and 117°, and the hyperbolic dodecahedron with dihedral angle 72° may be used to give the Seifert–Weber space a geometric structure as a hyperbolic manifold. It is a quotient space of the order-5 dodecahedral honeycomb, a regular tessellation of hyperbolic 3-space by dodecahedra with this dihedral angle.

Gieseking manifold

In mathematics, the Gieseking manifold is a cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold of finite volume. It is non-orientable and has the smallest volume among non-compact hyperbolic manifolds, having volume approximately 1.01494161. It was discovered by Gieseking (1912).

The Gieseking manifold can be constructed by removing the vertices from a tetrahedron, then gluing the faces together in pairs using affine-linear maps. Label the vertices 0, 1, 2, 3. Glue the face with vertices 0,1,2 to the face with vertices 3,1,0 in that order. Glue the face 0,2,3 to the face 3,2,1 in that order. In the hyperbolic structure of the Gieseking manifold, this ideal tetrahedron is the canonical polyhedral decomposition of Epstein-Penner. Moreover, the angle made by the faces is ${\displaystyle \pi /3}$. The triangulation has one tetrahedron, two faces, one edge and no vertices, so all the edges of the original tetrahedron are glued together.

Some important classes of 3-manifolds

• Graph manifold
• Haken manifold
• Homology spheres
• Hyperbolic 3-manifold
• I-bundles
• Knot and link complements
• Lens space
• Seifert fiber spaces, Circle bundles
• Spherical 3-manifold
• Surface bundles over the circle
• Torus bundle

Hyperbolic link complements

Borromean rings are a hyperbolic link.

A hyperbolic link is a link in the 3-sphere with complement that has a complete Riemannian metric of constant negative curvature, i.e. has a hyperbolic geometry. A hyperbolic knot is a hyperbolic link with one component.

The following examples are particularly well-known and studied.

• Figure eight knot
• Whitehead link
• Borromean rings

The classes are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Some important structures on 3-manifolds

Contact geometry

Contact geometry is the study of a geometric structure on smooth manifolds given by a hyperplane distribution in the tangent bundle and specified by a one-form, both of which satisfy a 'maximum non-degeneracy' condition called 'complete non-integrability'. From the Frobenius theorem, one recognizes the condition as the opposite of the condition that the distribution be determined by a codimension one foliation on the manifold ('complete integrability').

Contact geometry is in many ways an odd-dimensional counterpart of symplectic geometry, which belongs to the even-dimensional world. Both contact and symplectic geometry are motivated by the mathematical formalism of classical mechanics, where one can consider either the even-dimensional phase space of a mechanical system or the odd-dimensional extended phase space that includes the time variable.

Haken manifold

A Haken manifold is a compact, P²-irreducible 3-manifold that is sufficiently large, meaning that it contains a properly embedded two-sided incompressible surface. Sometimes one considers only orientable Haken manifolds, in which case a Haken manifold is a compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold that contains an orientable, incompressible surface.

A 3-manifold finitely covered by a Haken manifold is said to be virtually Haken. The Virtually Haken conjecture asserts that every compact, irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group is virtually Haken.

Haken manifolds were introduced by Wolfgang Haken. Haken proved that Haken manifolds have a hierarchy, where they can be split up into 3-balls along incompressible surfaces. Haken also showed that there was a finite procedure to find an incompressible surface if the 3-manifold had one. Jaco and Oertel gave an algorithm to determine if a 3-manifold was Haken.

Essential lamination

An essential lamination is a lamination where every leaf is incompressible and end incompressible, if the complementary regions of the lamination are irreducible, and if there are no spherical leaves. Essential laminations generalize the incompressible surfaces found in Haken manifolds.

Heegaard splitting

A Heegaard splitting is a decomposition of a compact oriented 3-manifold that results from dividing it into two handlebodies.

Every closed, orientable three-manifold may be so obtained; this follows from deep results on the triangulability of three-manifolds due to Moise. This contrasts strongly with higher-dimensional manifolds which need not admit smooth or piecewise linear structures. Assuming smoothness the existence of a Heegaard splitting also follows from the work of Smale about handle decompositions from Morse theory.

Taut foliation

A taut foliation is a codimension 1 foliation of a 3-manifold with the property that there is a single transverse circle intersecting every leaf. By transverse circle, is meant a closed loop that is always transverse to the tangent field of the foliation. Equivalently, by a result of Dennis Sullivan, a codimension 1 foliation is taut if there exists a Riemannian metric that makes each leaf a minimal surface.

Taut foliations were brought to prominence by the work of William Thurston and David Gabai.

Foundational results

Some results are named as conjectures as a result of historical artifacts.

We begin with the purely topological:

Moise's theorem

In geometric topology, Moise's theorem, proved by Edwin E. Moise in Moise (1952), states that any topological 3-manifold has an essentially unique piecewise-linear structure and smooth structure. As corollary, every compact 3-manifold has a Heegaard splitting.

Prime decomposition theorem

The prime decomposition theorem for 3-manifolds states that every compact, orientable 3-manifold is the connected sum of a unique (up to homeomorphism) collection of prime 3-manifolds.

A manifold is prime if it cannot be presented as a connected sum of more than one manifold, none of which is the sphere of the same dimension.

Kneser–Haken finiteness

Kneser-Haken finiteness says that for each 3-manifold, there is a constant C such that any collection of surfaces of cardinality greater than C must contain parallel elements.

Loop and Sphere theorems

The loop theorem is a generalization of Dehn's lemma and should more properly be called the "disk theorem". It was first proven by Christos Papakyriakopoulos in 1956, along with Dehn's lemma and the Sphere theorem.

A simple and useful version of the loop theorem states that if there is a map

${\displaystyle f\colon (D^{2},\partial D^{2})\to (M,\partial M)\,}$

with ${\displaystyle f|\partial D^{2}}$ not nullhomotopic in ${\displaystyle \partial M}$, then there is an embedding with the same property.

The sphere theorem of Papakyriakopoulos (1957) gives conditions for elements of the second homotopy group of a 3-manifold to be represented by embedded spheres.
One example is the following:

Let ${\displaystyle M}$ be an orientable 3-manifold such that ${\displaystyle \pi _{2}(M)}$ is not the trivial group. Then there exists a non-zero element of ${\displaystyle \pi _{2}(M)}$ having a representative that is an embedding ${\displaystyle S^{2}\to M}$.

Annulus and Torus theorems

The annulus theorem states that if a pair of disjoint simple closed curves on the boundary of a three manifold are freely homotopic then they cobound a properly embedded annulus. This should not be confused with the high dimensional theorem of the same name.

The torus theorem is as follows: Let M be a compact, irreducible 3-manifold with nonempty boundary. If M admits an essential map of a torus, then M admits an essential embedding of either a torus or an annulus

JSJ decomposition

The JSJ decomposition, also known as the toral decomposition, is a topological construct given by the following theorem:

Irreducible orientable closed (i.e., compact and without boundary) 3-manifolds have a unique (up to isotopy) minimal collection of disjointly embedded incompressible tori such that each component of the 3-manifold obtained by cutting along the tori is either atoroidal or Seifert-fibered.

The acronym JSJ is for William Jaco, Peter Shalen, and Klaus Johannson. The first two worked together, and the third worked independently.

Scott core theorem

The Scott core theorem is a theorem about the finite presentability of fundamental groups of 3-manifolds due to G. Peter Scott. The precise statement is as follows:

Given a 3-manifold (not necessarily compact) with finitely generated fundamental group, there is a compact three-dimensional submanifold, called the compact core or Scott core, such that its inclusion map induces an isomorphism on fundamental groups. In particular, this means a finitely generated 3-manifold group is finitely presentable.

A simplified proof is given in, and a stronger uniqueness statement is proven in.

Lickorish-Wallace theorem

The Lickorish–Wallace theorem states that any closed, orientable, connected 3-manifold may be obtained by performing Dehn surgery on a framed link in the 3-sphere with ±1 surgery coefficients. Furthermore, each component of the link can be assumed to be unknotted.

Waldhausen's theorems on topological rigidity

Waldhausen's theorems on topological rigidity say that certain 3-manifolds (such as those with an incompressible surface) are homeomorphic if there is an isomorphism of fundamental groups which respects the boundary.

Waldhausen conjecture on Heegaard splittings

Waldhausen conjectured that every closed orientable 3-manifold has only finitely many Heegaard splittings (up to homeomorphism) of any given genus.

Smith conjecture

The Smith conjecture (now proven) states that if f is a diffeomorphism of the 3-sphere of finite order, then the fixed point set of f cannot be a nontrivial knot.

Cyclic surgery theorem

The cyclic surgery theorem states that, for a compact, connected, orientable, irreducible three-manifold M whose boundary is a torus T, if M is not a Seifert-fibered space and r,s are slopes on T such that their Dehn fillings have cyclic fundamental group, then the distance between r and s (the minimal number of times that two simple closed curves in T representing r and s must intersect) is at most 1. Consequently, there are at most three Dehn fillings of M with cyclic fundamental group.

Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem and the Jørgensen–Thurston theorem

Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem states: ${\displaystyle M(u_{1},u_{2},\dots ,u_{n})}$ is hyperbolic as long as a finite set of exceptional slopes ${\displaystyle E_{i}}$ is avoided for the i-th cusp for each i. In addition, ${\displaystyle M(u_{1},u_{2},\dots ,u_{n})}$ converges to M in H as all ${\displaystyle p_{i}^{2}+q_{i}^{2}\rightarrow \infty }$ for all ${\displaystyle p_{i}/q_{i}}$ corresponding to non-empty Dehn fillings ${\displaystyle u_{i}}$.

This theorem is due to William Thurston and fundamental to the theory of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. It shows that nontrivial limits exist in H. Troels Jorgensen's study of the geometric topology further shows that all nontrivial limits arise by Dehn filling as in the theorem.

Another important result by Thurston is that volume decreases under hyperbolic Dehn filling. In fact, the theorem states that volume decreases under topological Dehn filling, assuming of course that the Dehn-filled manifold is hyperbolic. The proof relies on basic properties of the Gromov norm.

Jørgensen also showed that the volume function on this space is a continuous, proper function. Thus by the previous results, nontrivial limits in H are taken to nontrivial limits in the set of volumes. In fact, one can further conclude, as did Thurston, that the set of volumes of finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds has ordinal type ${\displaystyle \omega ^{\omega }}$. This result is known as the Thurston-Jørgensen theorem. Further work characterizing this set was done by Gromov.

Also, Gabai, Meyerhoff & Milley showed that the Weeks manifold has the smallest volume of any closed orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold.

Thurston's hyperbolization theorem for Haken manifolds

One form of Thurston's geometrization theorem states: If M is an compact irreducible atoroidal Haken manifold whose boundary has zero Euler characteristic, then the interior of M has a complete hyperbolic structure of finite volume.
The Mostow rigidity theorem implies that if a manifold of dimension at least 3 has a hyperbolic structure of finite volume, then it is essentially unique.

The conditions that the manifold M should be irreducible and atoroidal are necessary, as hyperbolic manifolds have these properties. However the condition that the manifold be Haken is unnecessarily strong. Thurston's hyperbolization conjecture states that a closed irreducible atoroidal 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group is hyperbolic, and this follows from Perelman's proof of the Thurston geometrization conjecture.

Tameness conjecture, also called the Marden conjecture or tame ends conjecture

The tameness theorem states that every complete hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is topologically tame, in other words homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold.

The tameness theorem was conjectured by Marden. It was proved by Agol and, independently, by Danny Calegari and David Gabai. It is one of the fundamental properties of geometrically infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds, together with the density theorem for Kleinian groups and the ending lamination theorem. It also implies the Ahlfors measure conjecture.

Ending lamination conjecture

The ending lamination theorem, originally conjectured by William Thurston and later proven by Minsky, Brock and Canary, states that hyperbolic 3-manifolds with finitely generated fundamental groups are determined by their topology together with certain "end invariants", which are geodesic laminations on some surfaces in the boundary of the manifold.

Poincaré conjecture

The 3-sphere is an especially important 3-manifold because of the now-proven Poincaré conjecture. Originally conjectured by Henri Poincaré, the theorem concerns a space that locally looks like ordinary three-dimensional space but is connected, finite in size, and lacks any boundary (a closed 3-manifold). The Poincaré conjecture claims that if such a space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a three-dimensional sphere. An analogous result has been known in higher dimensions for some time.

After nearly a century of effort by mathematicians, Grigori Perelman presented a proof of the conjecture in three papers made available in 2002 and 2003 on arXiv. The proof followed on from the program of Richard S. Hamilton to use the Ricci flow to attack the problem. Perelman introduced a modification of the standard Ricci flow, called Ricci flow with surgery to systematically excise singular regions as they develop, in a controlled way. Several teams of mathematicians have verified that Perelman's proof is correct.

Thurston's geometrization conjecture

Thurston's geometrization conjecture states that certain three-dimensional topological spaces each have a unique geometric structure that can be associated with them. It is an analogue of the uniformization theorem for two-dimensional surfaces, which states that every simply connected Riemann surface can be given one of three geometries (Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic). In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole topological space. Instead, the geometrization conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed in a canonical way into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure. The conjecture was proposed by William Thurston (1982), and implies several other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's elliptization conjecture.

Thurston's hyperbolization theorem implies that Haken manifolds satisfy the geometrization conjecture. Thurston announced a proof in the 1980s and since then several complete proofs have appeared in print.

Grigori Perelman sketched a proof of the full geometrization conjecture in 2003 using Ricci flow with surgery. There are now several different manuscripts (see below) with details of the proof. The Poincaré conjecture and the spherical space form conjecture are corollaries of the geometrization conjecture, although there are shorter proofs of the former that do not lead to the geometrization conjecture.

Virtually fibered conjecture and Virtually Haken conjecture

The virtually fibered conjecture, formulated by American mathematician William Thurston, states that every closed, irreducible, atoroidal 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group has a finite cover which is a surface bundle over the circle.

The virtually Haken conjecture states that every compact, orientable, irreducible three-dimensional manifold with infinite fundamental group is virtually Haken. That is, it has a finite cover (a covering space with a finite-to-one covering map) that is a Haken manifold.

In a posting on the ArXiv on 25 Aug 2009, Daniel Wise implicitly implied (by referring to a then unpublished longer manuscript) that he had proven the Virtually fibered conjecture for the case where the 3-manifold is closed, hyperbolic, and Haken. This was followed by a survey article in Electronic Research Announcements in Mathematical Sciences. Several more preprints have followed, including the aforementioned longer manuscript by Wise. In March 2012, during a conference at Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, Ian Agol announced he could prove the virtually Haken conjecture for closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds . The proof built on results of Kahn and Markovic in their proof of the Surface subgroup conjecture and results of Dani Wise in proving the Malnormal Special Quotient Theorem and results of Bergeron and Wise for the cubulation of groups. Taken together with Daniel Wise's results, this implies the virtually fibered conjecture for all closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

Simple loop conjecture

If ${\displaystyle f:S\rightarrow T}$ is a map of closed connected surfaces such that ${\displaystyle f^{\star }:\pi _{1}(S)\rightarrow \pi _{1}(T)}$ is not injectiυe, then there exists a non contractible simple closed curve ${\displaystyle \alpha \subset S}$ such that ${\displaystyle f|_{a}}$ is homotopically trivial. It was proven by Gabai.

Surface subgroup conjecture

The surface subgroup conjecture of Friedhelm Waldhausen states that the fundamental group of every closed, irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group has a surface subgroup. By "surface subgroup" we mean the fundamental group of a closed surface not the 2-sphere. This problem is listed as Problem 3.75 in Robion Kirby's problem list.

Assuming the geometrization conjecture, the only open case was that of closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds. A proof of this case was announced in the Summer of 2009 by Jeremy Kahn and Vladimir Markovic and outlined in a talk August 4, 2009 at the FRG (Focused Research Group) Conference hosted by the University of Utah. A preprint appeared in the arxiv.org server in October 2009. Their paper was published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2012 . In June 2012, Kahn and Markovic were given the Clay Research Awards by the Clay Mathematics Institute at a ceremony in Oxford.

Important conjectures

Cabling conjecture

The cabling conjecture states that if Dehn surgery on a knot in the 3-sphere yields a reducible 3-manifold, then that knot is a (p,q)-cable on some other knot, and the surgery must have been performed using the slope pq.

Lubotzy-Sarnak conjecture

The fundamental group of any finite volume hyperbolic n-manifold does not have Property τ .

Dimension

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From left to right: the square, the cube and the tesseract. The two-dimensional (2d) square is bounded by one-dimensional (1d) lines; the three-dimensional (3d) cube by two-dimensional areas; and the four-dimensional (4d) tesseract by three-dimensional volumes. For display on a two-dimensional surface such as a screen, the 3d cube and 4d tesseract require projection.

 

The first four spatial dimensions, represented in a two-dimensional picture.

1. Two points can be connected to create a line segment.
2. Two parallel line segments can be connected to form a square.
3. Two parallel squares can be connected to form a cube.
4. Two parallel cubes can be connected to form a tesseract.

In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it – for example, the point at 5 on a number line. A surface such as a plane or the surface of a cylinder or sphere has a dimension of two because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on it – for example, both a latitude and longitude are required to locate a point on the surface of a sphere. The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional because three coordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces.

In classical mechanics, space and time are different categories and refer to absolute space and time. That conception of the world is a four-dimensional space but not the one that was found necessary to describe electromagnetism. The four dimensions of spacetime consist of events that are not absolutely defined spatially and temporally, but rather are known relative to the motion of an observer. Minkowski space first approximates the universe without gravity; the pseudo-Riemannian manifolds of general relativity describe spacetime with matter and gravity. Ten dimensions are used to describe string theory, eleven dimensions can describe supergravity and M-theory, and the state-space of quantum mechanics is an infinite-dimensional function space.

The concept of dimension is not restricted to physical objects. High-dimensional spaces frequently occur in mathematics and the sciences. They may be parameter spaces or configuration spaces such as in Lagrangian or Hamiltonian mechanics; these are abstract spaces, independent of the physical space we live in.

In mathematics

In mathematics, the dimension of an object is, roughly speaking, the number of degrees of freedom of a point that moves on this object. In other words, the dimension is the number of independent parameters or coordinates that are needed for defining the position of a point that is constrained to be on the object. For example, the dimension of a point is zero; the dimension of a line is one, as a point can move on a line in only one direction (or its opposite); the dimension of a plane is two, etc.

The dimension is an intrinsic property of an object, in the sense that it is independent of the dimension of the space in which the object is or can be embedded. For example, a curve, such as a circle is of dimension one, because the position of a point on a curve is determined by its signed distance along the curve to a fixed point on the curve. This is independent from the fact that a curve cannot be embedded in a Euclidean space of dimension lower than two, unless if it is a line.

The dimension of Euclidean n-space Eⁿ is n. When trying to generalize to other types of spaces, one is faced with the question "what makes Eⁿ n-dimensional?" One answer is that to cover a fixed ball in Eⁿ by small balls of radius ε, one needs on the order of ε⁻ⁿ such small balls. This observation leads to the definition of the Minkowski dimension and its more sophisticated variant, the Hausdorff dimension, but there are also other answers to that question. For example, the boundary of a ball in Eⁿ looks locally like E^n-1 and this leads to the notion of the inductive dimension. While these notions agree on Eⁿ, they turn out to be different when one looks at more general spaces.

A tesseract is an example of a four-dimensional object. Whereas outside mathematics the use of the term "dimension" is as in: "A tesseract has four dimensions", mathematicians usually express this as: "The tesseract has dimension 4", or: "The dimension of the tesseract is 4".

Although the notion of higher dimensions goes back to René Descartes, substantial development of a higher-dimensional geometry only began in the 19th century, via the work of Arthur Cayley, William Rowan Hamilton, Ludwig Schläfli and Bernhard Riemann. Riemann's 1854 Habilitationsschrift, Schläfli's 1852 Theorie der vielfachen Kontinuität, and Hamilton's discovery of the quaternions and John T. Graves' discovery of the octonions in 1843 marked the beginning of higher-dimensional geometry.

The rest of this section examines some of the more important mathematical definitions of dimension.

Vector spaces

The dimension of a vector space is the number of vectors in any basis for the space, i.e. the number of coordinates necessary to specify any vector. This notion of dimension (the cardinality of a basis) is often referred to as the Hamel dimension or algebraic dimension to distinguish it from other notions of dimension.

For the non-free case, this generalizes to the notion of the length of a module.

Manifolds

The uniquely defined dimension of every connected topological manifold can be calculated. A connected topological manifold is locally homeomorphic to Euclidean n-space, in which the number n is the manifold's dimension.

For connected differentiable manifolds, the dimension is also the dimension of the tangent vector space at any point.

In geometric topology, the theory of manifolds is characterized by the way dimensions 1 and 2 are relatively elementary, the high-dimensional cases n > 4 are simplified by having extra space in which to "work"; and the cases n = 3 and 4 are in some senses the most difficult. This state of affairs was highly marked in the various cases of the Poincaré conjecture, where four different proof methods are applied.

Complex dimension

The dimension of a manifold depends on the base field with respect to which Euclidean space is defined. While analysis usually assumes a manifold to be over the real numbers, it is sometimes useful in the study of complex manifolds and algebraic varieties to work over the complex numbers instead. A complex number (x + iy) has a real part x and an imaginary part y, where x and y are both real numbers; hence, the complex dimension is half the real dimension.

Conversely, in algebraically unconstrained contexts, a single complex coordinate system may be applied to an object having two real dimensions. For example, an ordinary two-dimensional spherical surface, when given a complex metric, becomes a Riemann sphere of one complex dimension.

Varieties

The dimension of an algebraic variety may be defined in various equivalent ways. The most intuitive way is probably the dimension of the tangent space at any Regular point of an algebraic variety. Another intuitive way is to define the dimension as the number of hyperplanes that are needed in order to have an intersection with the variety that is reduced to a finite number of points (dimension zero). This definition is based on the fact that the intersection of a variety with a hyperplane reduces the dimension by one unless if the hyperplane contains the variety.

An algebraic set being a finite union of algebraic varieties, its dimension is the maximum of the dimensions of its components. It is equal to the maximal length of the chains ${\displaystyle V_{0}\subsetneq V_{1}\subsetneq \ldots \subsetneq V_{d}}$ of sub-varieties of the given algebraic set (the length of such a chain is the number of "${\displaystyle \subsetneq }$").

Each variety can be considered as an algebraic stack, and its dimension as variety agrees with its dimension as stack. There are however many stacks which do not correspond to varieties, and some of these have negative dimension. Specifically, if V is a variety of dimension m and G is an algebraic group of dimension n acting on V, then the quotient stack [V/G] has dimension m−n.

Krull dimension

The Krull dimension of a commutative ring is the maximal length of chains of prime ideals in it, a chain of length n being a sequence ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {P}}_{0}\subsetneq {\mathcal {P}}_{1}\subsetneq \ldots \subsetneq {\mathcal {P}}_{n}}$ of prime ideals related by inclusion. It is strongly related to the dimension of an algebraic variety, because of the natural correspondence between sub-varieties and prime ideals of the ring of the polynomials on the variety.

For an algebra over a field, the dimension as vector space is finite if and only if its Krull dimension is 0.

Topological spaces

For any normal topological space X, the Lebesgue covering dimension of X is defined to be n if n is the smallest integer for which the following holds: any open cover has an open refinement (a second open cover where each element is a subset of an element in the first cover) such that no point is included in more than n + 1 elements. In this case dim X = n. For X a manifold, this coincides with the dimension mentioned above. If no such integer n exists, then the dimension of X is said to be infinite, and one writes dim X = ∞. Moreover, X has dimension −1, i.e. dim X = −1 if and only if X is empty. This definition of covering dimension can be extended from the class of normal spaces to all Tychonoff spaces merely by replacing the term "open" in the definition by the term "functionally open".

An inductive dimension may be defined inductively as follows. Consider a discrete set of points (such as a finite collection of points) to be 0-dimensional. By dragging a 0-dimensional object in some direction, one obtains a 1-dimensional object. By dragging a 1-dimensional object in a new direction, one obtains a 2-dimensional object. In general one obtains an (n + 1)-dimensional object by dragging an n-dimensional object in a new direction. The inductive dimension of a topological space may refer to the small inductive dimension or the large inductive dimension, and is based on the analogy that (n + 1)-dimensional balls have n-dimensional boundaries, permitting an inductive definition based on the dimension of the boundaries of open sets.

Similarly, for the class of CW complexes, the dimension of an object is the largest n for which the n-skeleton is nontrivial. Intuitively, this can be described as follows: if the original space can be continuously deformed into a collection of higher-dimensional triangles joined at their faces with a complicated surface, then the dimension of the object is the dimension of those triangles.

Hausdorff dimension

The Hausdorff dimension is useful for studying structurally complicated sets, especially fractals. The Hausdorff dimension is defined for all metric spaces and, unlike the dimensions considered above, can also have non-integer real values. The box dimension or Minkowski dimension is a variant of the same idea. In general, there exist more definitions of fractal dimensions that work for highly irregular sets and attain non-integer positive real values. Fractals have been found useful to describe many natural objects and phenomena.

Hilbert spaces

Every Hilbert space admits an orthonormal basis, and any two such bases for a particular space have the same cardinality. This cardinality is called the dimension of the Hilbert space. This dimension is finite if and only if the space's Hamel dimension is finite, and in this case the two dimensions coincide.

In physics

Spatial dimensions

Classical physics theories describe three physical dimensions: from a particular point in space, the basic directions in which we can move are up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. Movement in any other direction can be expressed in terms of just these three. Moving down is the same as moving up a negative distance. Moving diagonally upward and forward is just as the name of the direction implies; i.e., moving in a linear combination of up and forward. In its simplest form: a line describes one dimension, a plane describes two dimensions, and a cube describes three dimensions.

Time

A temporal dimension is a dimension of time. Time is often referred to as the "fourth dimension" for this reason, but that is not to imply that it is a spatial dimension. A temporal dimension is one way to measure physical change. It is perceived differently from the three spatial dimensions in that there is only one of it, and that we cannot move freely in time but subjectively move in one direction.
The equations used in physics to model reality do not treat time in the same way that humans commonly perceive it. The equations of classical mechanics are symmetric with respect to time, and equations of quantum mechanics are typically symmetric if both time and other quantities (such as charge and parity) are reversed. In these models, the perception of time flowing in one direction is an artifact of the laws of thermodynamics (we perceive time as flowing in the direction of increasing entropy).

The best-known treatment of time as a dimension is Poincaré and Einstein's special relativity (and extended to general relativity), which treats perceived space and time as components of a four-dimensional manifold, known as spacetime, and in the special, flat case as Minkowski space.

Additional dimensions

In physics, three dimensions of space and one of time is the accepted norm. However, there are theories that attempt to unify the four fundamental forces by introducing extra dimensions. Most notably, superstring theory requires 10 spacetime dimensions, and originates from a more fundamental 11-dimensional theory tentatively called M-theory which subsumes five previously distinct superstring theories. To date, no experimental or observational evidence is available to confirm the existence of these extra dimensions. If extra dimensions exist, they must be hidden from us by some physical mechanism. One well-studied possibility is that the extra dimensions may be "curled up" at such tiny scales as to be effectively invisible to current experiments. Limits on the size and other properties of extra dimensions are set by particle experiments such as those at the Large Hadron Collider.

At the level of quantum field theory, Kaluza–Klein theory unifies gravity with gauge interactions, based on the realization that gravity propagating in small, compact extra dimensions is equivalent to gauge interactions at long distances. In particular when the geometry of the extra dimensions is trivial, it reproduces electromagnetism. However at sufficiently high energies or short distances, this setup still suffers from the same pathologies that famously obstruct direct attempts to describe quantum gravity. Therefore, these models still require a UV completion, of the kind that string theory is intended to provide. In particular, superstring theory requires six compact dimensions forming a Calabi–Yau manifold. Thus Kaluza-Klein theory may be considered either as an incomplete description on its own, or as a subset of string theory model building.

In addition to small and curled up extra dimensions, there may be extra dimensions that instead aren't apparent because the matter associated with our visible universe is localized on a (3 + 1)-dimensional subspace. Thus the extra dimensions need not be small and compact but may be large extra dimensions. D-branes are dynamical extended objects of various dimensionalities predicted by string theory that could play this role. They have the property that open string excitations, which are associated with gauge interactions, are confined to the brane by their endpoints, whereas the closed strings that mediate the gravitational interaction are free to propagate into the whole spacetime, or "the bulk". This could be related to why gravity is exponentially weaker than the other forces, as it effectively dilutes itself as it propagates into a higher-dimensional volume.

Some aspects of brane physics have been applied to cosmology. For example, brane gas cosmology attempts to explain why there are three dimensions of space using topological and thermodynamic considerations. According to this idea it would be because three is the largest number of spatial dimensions where strings can generically intersect. If initially there are lots of windings of strings around compact dimensions, space could only expand to macroscopic sizes once these windings are eliminated, which requires oppositely wound strings to find each other and annihilate. But strings can only find each other to annihilate at a meaningful rate in three dimensions, so it follows that only three dimensions of space are allowed to grow large given this kind of initial configuration.
Extra dimensions are said to be universal if all fields are equally free to propagate within them.

Networks and dimension

Some complex networks are characterized by fractal dimensions. The concept of dimension can be generalized to include networks embedded in space. The dimension characterize their spatial constraints.

In literature

Science fiction texts often mention the concept of "dimension" when referring to parallel or alternate universes or other imagined planes of existence. This usage is derived from the idea that to travel to parallel/alternate universes/planes of existence one must travel in a direction/dimension besides the standard ones. In effect, the other universes/planes are just a small distance away from our own, but the distance is in a fourth (or higher) spatial (or non-spatial) dimension, not the standard ones. One of the most heralded science fiction stories regarding true geometric dimensionality, and often recommended as a starting point for those just starting to investigate such matters, is the 1884 novella Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. Isaac Asimov, in his foreword to the Signet Classics 1984 edition, described Flatland as "The best introduction one can find into the manner of perceiving dimensions."

The idea of other dimensions was incorporated into many early science fiction stories, appearing prominently, for example, in Miles J. Breuer's The Appendix and the Spectacles (1928) and Murray Leinster's The Fifth-Dimension Catapult (1931); and appeared irregularly in science fiction by the 1940s. Classic stories involving other dimensions include Robert A. Heinlein's —And He Built a Crooked House (1941), in which a California architect designs a house based on a three-dimensional projection of a tesseract; and Alan E. Nourse's Tiger by the Tail and The Universe Between (both 1951). Another reference is Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle In Time (1962), which uses the fifth dimension as a way for "tesseracting the universe" or "folding" space in order to move across it quickly. The fourth and fifth dimensions were also a key component of the book The Boy Who Reversed Himself by William Sleator.

In philosophy

Immanuel Kant, in 1783, wrote: "That everywhere space (which is not itself the boundary of another space) has three dimensions and that space in general cannot have more dimensions is based on the proposition that not more than three lines can intersect at right angles in one point. This proposition cannot at all be shown from concepts, but rests immediately on intuition and indeed on pure intuition a priori because it is apodictically (demonstrably) certain."

"Space has Four Dimensions" is a short story published in 1846 by German philosopher and experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner under the pseudonym "Dr. Mises". The protagonist in the tale is a shadow who is aware of and able to communicate with other shadows, but who is trapped on a two-dimensional surface. According to Fechner, this "shadow-man" would conceive of the third dimension as being one of time. The story bears a strong similarity to the "Allegory of the Cave" presented in Plato's The Republic (c. 380 BC).

Simon Newcomb wrote an article for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 1898 entitled "The Philosophy of Hyperspace". Linda Dalrymple Henderson coined the term "hyperspace philosophy", used to describe writing that uses higher dimensions to explore metaphysical themes, in her 1983 thesis about the fourth dimension in early-twentieth-century art. Examples of "hyperspace philosophers" include Charles Howard Hinton, the first writer, in 1888, to use the word "tesseract"; and the Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky.